Tomsk mayor’s wife reportedly threw banking records out of window prior to apartment search

The wife of Tomsk Mayor Ivan Klyayn — the general director of the company “Tomskoe Pivo” (Tomsk Beer), Galina Klyayn — reportedly threw a pillowcase full of her family’s banking records out of a window moments before investigators searched their home on Friday, November 13. This was first reported by the news outlet Mash on the day of the search. Sources later confirmed these reports to the newspaper Kommersant.

Apparently, Galina Klyayn tossed the pillowcase full of documents out of a second-floor window of the family’s apartment in downtown Tomsk when the investigators leading the case against her husband began ringing the doorbell on the morning of November 13. A man standing below the window caught the pillowcase and carried it to a nearby car. According to Mash, the man in question is Galina Klyayn’s personal driver.

Law enforcement officers confiscated the pillowcase from the driver. Inside, they found documents containing information on bank accounts in Russia and Switzerland used by the Klyayn family. According to Kommersant, the accounts held approximately 1.3 billion rubles (about $17 million), while Mash estimated the amount of funds held in the accounts at more than two billion rubles (about $26 million).

Galina Klyayn has not made any comments about the incident to the media. According to Tomskoe Pivo, she has gone on vacation for a week.

On November 13, FSB officers arrested Tomsk Mayor Ivan Klyayn on suspicion of abuse of office. Allegedly, he asked his subordinate — the head of the Urban Planning Department — to register the site of Tomskoe Pivo (a company he and his family members own) as a sanitary protection zone to prevent another businessman from building houses nearby. Ivan Klyayn was jailed on November 14 and his lawyers are preparing an appeal for his release from custody. 

United Russia party member Ivan Klyayn was elected mayor of Tomsk in 2013. Previously, he headed the company Tomskoe Pivo and was a lawmaker on the Tomsk regional council.

Klyayn is the third Tomsk mayor in a row to face criminal prosecution. His predecessor, Nikolai Nikolaychuk, was convicted of negligence and sentenced to four years probation in 2015. Another former Tomsk mayor, Alexander Makarov, was sentenced for 12 years in a maximum security prison for abuse of office, extortion, and bribe taking in 2010.